He Who Ruled By Fear

Junior Division
Group Website
Ayden Arnold and Elizabeth Park
Word Count: 500

Upon the announcement of this years National History Day theme, my partner and I wanted an
unconventional topic, but one that still fit the theme of leadership and legacy. We looked into things such as
American government, early American leaders, and many other things, but we finally decided that a more
peculiar topic would be interesting. After about a week of deliberation we decided to do an American cult
leader. Once we had determined that we had chosen this area of emphasis for our project we began to specify
who we were going to do the research on. Then we finally came upon Jim Jones and he particularly stood out
to us. We also couldnt think of a better person who represented a form of leadership and left a quite
extensive and interesting legacy.
When we finally found a topic we chose to split our topic up three ways and gather the information
that way. First we had Joness childhood or early years, then we had the Peoples Temple era, and finally the
significance. After we established this we started researching secondary sources which were fairly effortless
to find. Although there is a great deal of controversy on this topic and due to this fact it made it challenging
to find primary sources. However when we started to go deeper into the descriptions that we looked up it
became much more manageable. We found articles and interviews of the survivors in addition to one of
Joness adopted son, Jim Jones Jr., which provided some insight into the Jonestown massacre.
In order to express our topic with enthusiasm we decided to do a website. We chose this
presentation category due to the fact that it was one of the newer categories and the judges have not seen an
abundance of websites as they have other categories. We also felt that it was a more unique way to inform the
audience about our topic. In addition to this we felt that this was the best way to convey the information that
is being presented. A website allowed us to mention all of the information we had gathered and still allowed
us to be individuals with the formatting and organization of the information.
Our topic of Jim Jones relates to the theme of leadership and legacy, because Jones was one of the
most influential leaders in religion and left us a legacy that will be near impossible to consign to oblivion. He
was able to manipulate over 1000 people to pursue a religious group that they were unfamiliar with and
abandon their lives with just his preachings. He left an unclear legacy of a man who wanted equality and
acceptance, however he became paranoid and discarded all of these values and committed murder-suicide
and killed over 900 people. Although we picked a topic on the darker side of the theme it is still a compelling
topic.

Word Count: 500